5 Ways Instagram Can Save Your Marriage and Sanity

"You'd be hard-pressed to find a lot of people out there willing to argue that things like Facebook and Twitter help strengthen relationships and mental health, but you'd also be hard-pressed to discover people making those arguments who aren't also on some form of social media."

It's Twitter's 8th birthday, and to "celebrate," the platform is helping you "discover your first tweet." First of all, I don't want to celebrate Twitter, and second, I know what my first tweet was because it's from about a month and half ago. It reads: "I'm on twitter again. I'm betting I make it two weeks this time." That was six weeks ago, so like most things on Twitter, my first tweet was factually incorrect. Finding your first tweet is dumb. It's okay to admit that you don't care what your first tweet was—or even what your most recent tweet said.

Why? Because social media is bad. It's like a river of sewage filled with partially digested ideas and information flowing outside your family's front window. My wife, Karel, hates when I try to "do social media." I get weird and obsessively myopic. Checking messages and looking for updates turns into a weird tick, and I get incredibly grumpy because my faith in humanity and the people I know takes a dramatic turn for the worse. I would argue that most people have similar issues with failing to ignore the stream of digital sewage flowing through the phones in their pockets. On our last date at a sushi restaurant, Karel and I were surrounded by two other couples at the bar. Neither couple was talking to each other; they were just staring at their phones.

The point is: You would be hard-pressed to find a lot of people out there willing to argue that things like Facebook and Twitter help strengthen relationships and mental health, but you'd also be hard-pressed to discover people making those arguments who aren't also on some form of social media. It provides the illusion of being connected, and who doesn't want to feel connected? This paradox is why I've become very picky about my social media involvement. I can't do Facebook—it hurts my soul too much. I'm grudgingly on Twitter because several people in my life told me I had to be because it's "part of my job."

However, I have found a social network that I quite enjoy and actually feel pretty good about being a part of: Instagram! I've decided that the photo-sharing platform is not only the most enjoyable form of social media, it's also the best social network for our collective sanity, relationships, and marriages. Here are five reasons why Instagram is the superlative social platform for modern families.

No parent-war drama

When was the last time you went to bed extremely angry because you got into a huge fight about your choice to breast-feed (or not breast-feed) on Instagram? It doesn't happen. Even if you post a picture of yourself feeding your kid in whatever fashion works for you, people just double-tap your photo and move on. Maybe it's the primitive commenting system, but Instagram seems to be free of all the manufactured beef over personal parenting choices. If I post a photo of my kids riding their scooters on Instagram, people tell me what a great photo it is. If I post the same pic to Facebook, 10 people I vaguely know point out that my kids aren't wearing helmets and threaten to call DHS on me because I'm clearly drunk and/or incompetent. For the record, I'm only one out of two of those things.

Instagram makes social media feel more productive and positive

Close your eyes and answer this question: If your husband is going to be staring at a computer screen for two hours every evening, would you rather he obsessively check Twitter to see if there were any new grains of information on the disappearance of flight MH730 and retweet every amateur pilot/geographer's hunch that appears in his timeline (you're not going to find the plane on Twitter, dude—step away from the computer and go to bed) OR he tried to find the perfect filter for a pretty decent photo he took of the dog looking guilty after eating a pair of your panties? One option brings more fear and paranoia into a world already brimming with fear and paranoia. The other brings a picture of a lab/German Shepherd mix with a black thong stuck between his teeth into the world. To me, the answer of what the world needs more of is pretty obvious.

Your Uncle Clyde isn't posting any conspiracy theories about Zionists, Papa John, and the Colorado River Compact of 1922 on Instagram—he's just taking pictures of his cat and the barn. First-person photography is a fairly difficult way to make inflammatory political or cultural statements. Even if someone you love manages to sneak some crazy into a photo they took, you're more likely to sit back and admire their creativity or use of light than you would be if they just carelessly reposted something horrible on Facebook without realizing it came from a white supremacist website. On Instagram, it's less likely that a family member will infuriate you and/or your partner to the point where you are forced to argue about whose family you're going to spend Easter with.

Social faux pas are more challenging to commit in picture form

Again, thanks to the limits of the medium and the crummy commenting system on Instagram, it's sort of impossible to make any social gaffes we associate with Twitter and Facebook. Your husband isn't "accidentally" going to make it known that he "liked" the Facebook page "Big Booties of the 215" because it showed up in all your friends and family members' timelines. Nor are you going to tweet congratulations to your sister-in-law on her pregnancy before she tells anyone. Life with your loved ones is much easier without these social landmines going off every now and again.

Instagram is a celebratory atmosphere

Here's the deal: Average Americans take pictures when we're happy. We take pictures when something strikes us as funny or different. We take selfies when we feel good about ourselves and think we look particularly good. We photograph our loved ones because we think they are the most gorgeous humans on the planet, and we want to preserve a precious few moments of that incredible life and beauty. We want other people to see it, too, so we share it.

Taking a photograph is a process. You have to bust out a camera during a particular moment in time and space. It draws attention to us, makes us feel weirdly vulnerable, and forces us to interact with our subjects in a different way. It feels strange to be the one person on a busy street who has his phone or camera out, photographing something no one else has noticed or is interested in. It feels weird to be so in love with watching your kid eat an ice cream cone, or your wife sitting on the front porch in the afternoon sunlight, that you want to hold on to it forever and for everyone who loves her to see it. But you are, and you do. So you take a picture and post it on Instagram, which is about a million times healthier than getting in a Facebook fight with your cousin Saul, who you've only ever met twice, about Papa John's supposed ties to the 12 most powerful rabbis from the each of the seven continents.**